Thursday, October 8, 2020

What are the uncertainties in Proust's masterwork?

Okay, I admit it. I never finished all seven books of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I read the first two because a graduate writing program required me to do so mand sometime after graduation I read "In a Budding Grove" a second time to build up momentum to continue on to Book 3, "The Guermantes Way." Sadly, I ran out of momentum by page 105. I know because that's where my bookmark remains.

In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past) (or A la recherche du temps perdu) is one of those literary peaks like Joyce's Ulysses, Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that anyone with literary pretensions ought to have climbed. I claim literary pretensions, but I'm afraid I've read only one of the six.

Because Proust has been waiting patiently on my bookshelf since the early 1980s, and because I believe it would be nice to have read his masterwork, I requested a review copy of Proustian Uncertanties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time by Saul Friedländer.

Friedländer is an award-winning Israeli-American historian and currently a professor of history (emeritus) at UCLA. He was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews, grew up in France, and lived in hiding during the German occupation of 1940–1944. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

He has truly and thoroughly read and reread In Search and recently "I noticed aspects that I had failed to see before, and as I soon realized after some inquiry, seemed to have generally escaped attention." It is these aspects to which he directs our attention in this short essay—156 pages.

In Search reads like a memoir, but the Narrator is not Proust, so Friedländer asks, "How does the Narrator define himself? We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the Narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the Narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does it reflect the author's position [Proust's mother was Jewish so according to Jewish law, Proust was Jewish], and how does the Narrator handle what he tries but does not manage to dismiss?"

Although the Narrator "recaptures the intense relation between mother and child," Proust never gives his parents names nor does he describe them. Proust had a brother; the Narrator has no siblings. Proust was half Jewish; the Narrator and his parents appear to be pious Catholics. Moreover, "the Narrator's attitude towards Jews is contradictory throughout the Search."

Proust was 25 when the Dreyfus Affair began to make the news, 35 when Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army. The Affair exposed a deep vein of anti-semitism in French society. The Narrator, like Proust, was pro-Dreyfus but apparently not because of Dreyfus's Jewishness, but "because of the injustice done to the officer, because of his suffering" on Devil's Island.

Proust's position toward homosexuality was clear in his life: "He told quite a few people about his unrequited and tragic love for Alfred Agostinelli" who died in a plane crash. The Narrator, however, has a rant against the homosexuality of Baron Charlus. Why? "Proust may have surmised that an openly homosexual novel," says Friedländer, "without any disclaimer, would have repelled many readers. Is that the answer? I do not know." Another Proustian uncertainty. 

Finally, Friedländer's asks if there is a comprehensive moral accounting in the novel. He writes, "there is no love in the Search without betrayal and jealousy; there is no friendship that lasts over time, no loyalty except that imposed by social imperatives. But isn't that mostly the case within any society? It wouldn't be worth dwelling on if the novel didn't insist on a somewhat unusual category of betrayals: that of parents by their children and particularly of doting fathers by their daughters. . . ."

For anyone who has wondered what the damned thing is about or whether to try it once again with an informed and insightful guide, Proustian Uncertainties is a good place to start.

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